EngageBay is an affordable all-in-one marketing, sales, and support CRM platform for small businesses. By integrating Plivo with EngageBay you can send SMS messages and make calls to your EngageBay contacts.

To use Plivo with EngageBay, you’ll need an EngageBay account and a voice- and SMS-enabled Plivo phone number. You can purchase numbers from the Phone Numbers page of the Plivo console, or by using the PhoneNumber API.

Set up Plivo in EngageBay

To get started, log in to the EngageBay dashboard, click on the Profile drop-down at the top right, then Preferences > Gadgets > Plivo (click Enable).

Enter your Plivo Auth ID and Auth Token, which you can find on the overview page of the Plivo console, and click Validate.

Once you validate your credentials, the next screen will prompt you to choose the Plivo phone numbers you want to enable on EngageBay. Choose the options you want and click Save.

Now you can use your Plivo number within EngageBay to send SMS messages and make voice calls.

Send SMS messages using Plivo

To send a text message, navigate to the contact you want to send a message to. Under the phone number in the left pane click SMS, then select Plivo from the drop-down menu.

A pop-up appears that prompts for the From number and message text you want to use. Fill in the details, then click Send. EngageBay will send the message to the contact’s phone number using Plivo as the SMS provider in the background.

Make calls using Plivo

To make a call, navigate to the contact you want to call to. Under the phone number in the left pane click Call, then select Plivo from the drop-down menu.

You’ll be asked to choose one of the Plivo numbers as the caller ID for the call. Once you select the phone number, EngageBay will call the contact’s phone number using Plivo as the voice provider in the background.

More Plivo integrations

You can integrate Plivo with many other integrations using platforms such as Zapier and Microsoft Power Automate. If your company has a SaaS platform and you’d like to integrate Plivo with it so you can give your customers easy access to voice calling and text messaging, let us know.

You can receive and automatically respond to incoming MMS messages on a Plivo number, as you might want to do for someone who’s out of the office or who leaves the company. Here’s how to use Plivo’s SMS API to build this use case.

Prerequisites

To get started, you need a Plivo account — sign up with your work email address if you don’t have one already. To receive incoming messages you must have a Plivo phone number that supports MMS; you can rent numbers from the Numbers page of the Plivo console or by using the Numbers API. If this is your first time using Plivo APIs, follow our instructions to set up a Python development environment and a web server and safely expose that server to the internet.

Create a Flask server to receive MMS messages

Create a file called receive_mms.py and paste into it this code.

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from flask import Flask, request
import plivo

app = Flask(__name__)


@app.route("/receive-mms/", methods=["GET", "POST"])
def receive_mms():
   # Receive MMS
   from_number = request.values.get("From")
   to_number = request.values.get("To")
   text = request.values.get("Text")
   media_url = request.values.get("Media0")
   print("MMS message received - From: %s, To: %s, Text: %s, Media: %s"% (from_number, to_number, text, media_url))

   if text.lower() == "hi":
       text = "Hello!!"
       media = ["https://media.giphy.com/media/888R35MJTmDxQfRzfS/giphy.gif"]

   elif text.lower() == "bye":
       text = "Bye and have a nice day!"
       media = ["https://media.giphy.com/media/QM5lHSyFjz1XW/giphy.gif"]
   else:
       text = "I am glad that we connected"
       media = ["https://media.giphy.com/media/888R35MJTmDxQfRzfS/giphy.gif"]

   # Reply recipient using Send MMS API
   client = plivo.RestClient("<auth_id>", "<auth_token>")
   response = client.messages.create(
       src=to_number,
       dst=from_number,
       text=text,
       media_urls=media,
       type_="mms"
   )
   print(response)

   return "MMS responded", 200


if __name__ == "__main__":
   app.run(host="0.0.0.0")

Replace the auth placeholders with your authentication credentials from the Plivo console

Note: We recommend that you store your credentials in the auth_id and auth_token environment variables, to avoid the possibility of accidentally committing them to source control. If you do this, you can initialize the client with no arguments and Plivo will automatically fetch the values from the environment variables. You can use os module(os.environ) to store environment variables and fetch them when initializing the client.

Test

Save the file and run it.

$ python receive_mms.py

You should see your basic server application in action at http://localhost:5000/receive-mms/.

Note: Sending and receiving MMS is only available in the United States and Canada.

Expose your local server to the internet.

Create a Plivo application

Associate the Flask server you created with Plivo by creating a Plivo application. Visiting Messaging > Applications and click Add New Application. You can also use Plivo’s Application API.

Give your application a name — we called our Receive-MMS. Enter the server URL you want to use (for example https://<yourdomain>.com/receive-mms/) in the Message URL field and set the method to POST. Click Create Application to save your application.

Assign a Plivo number to your application

Navigate to the Numbers page and select the phone number you want to use for this application. From the Application Type drop-down, select XML Application. From the Plivo Application drop-down, select Respond-MMS (the name we gave the application).

Click Update Number to save.

Test

Send a text message to the Plivo number you specified using any phone. The message should be replied to the destination number you specified.

Note: If you’re using a Plivo Trial account, you can make calls only to phone numbers that have been verified with Plivo. You can verify (sandbox) a number by going to the console’s Phone Numbers Sandbox Numbers page.

Haven’t tried Plivo yet? Getting started is easy and only takes minutes. Sign up today.

Plivo employs security best practices and policies to ensure that our network is secured physically and virtually and that our customers’ data and payment information is both private and secure. We use a comprehensive set of security controls and processes to track and secure your information. In addition, we have built a security-conscious culture from Day 1: everyone at Plivo knows security is our most important job.

But we don’t expect you to take our word for it. The Association of International Certified Professional Accountants (AICPA) runs independent audits of organizations looking at Systems and Organization Controls (SOC). In particular, the SOC 2 audit, for service organizations that hold, store, or process their users’ information, focuses on IT security and availability processes. This is the most thorough SOC protocol, attesting not only to the adequacy of our processes and systems, but also to our operational effectiveness in adhering to those controls over time.

We’re happy to announce that Plivo has obtained a SOC 2 Type 2 report detailing our systems’ operational effectiveness. The SOC 2 compliance report contains a history element that demonstrates how a company’s controls were managed over time. It also considers how well our internal controls and systems perform over time.

Sample of some controls covered in the SOC 2 Type 2 report include:

• Communication of changes to customers
• Internal access control to production environments
• System monitoring and ongoing risk assessments
• Disaster recovery and data backup
• System and security monitoring and incident response processes
• Employee onboarding and termination processes

We’re proud to have obtained this SOC 2 Type 2 certification. The SOC report represents our commitment to security and results from months of hard work by our team. And our commitment to security is more than a checkbox. We make sure that our systems and processes are up to the task of handling the sensitive data that our clients entrust us with every day.

The business-critical role assumed by Contact Centers has been driven by mounting customer expectations and requires more personalized touchpoints and faster issue resolution.

Consumers and the technologies they use are increasingly intelligent and require smarter solutions as we enter the next chapter of the unified Contact Center.

In the past couple of years, businesses have adopted modules from legacy vendors that promised features like AI, automations, self service, and native analytics within their existing solutions. They thought they were purchasing the future, only to realize three things:

1. Simplicity and flexibility are key with customer experience technology. Plugging in a module doesn’t necessarily equate to a personalized customer experience.
2. Contextual agent experience is more important than ever to build customer loyalty.
3. Voice as a channel contains incremental costs across every CCaaS provider; it adds up quickly, and it doesn’t have to.

While the Contact Center space is approaching maturity, it won’t truly arrive until we accept as an industry certain methodologies and tech prerequisites for the platforms that power the customer service experience.

• Contact Center software must serve as the primary hub of a modern CX tech stack.
• Contact Center software needs to provide an intuitive experience for agents and an invisible experience for customers.
• A single platform that can adapt and be customized is essential. Non-customizable tools with certain non-native features are a non-starter.

Verticalization of the Contact Center

Mid-year 2021, communications API industry veteran Plivo launched a powerful yet simple Contact Center platform—with fully native communication channels and analytics—to address the maturity gaps in an established and fast-evolving space. Plivo’s engineering team built a unified platform to manage the entire CX workflow, optimized the add-on costs of voice communications, and integrated it with the other complementary CX tools in your existing tech stack, all powered by Plivo’s communications API platform.

The result is Contacto, a fully native platform that integrates with tools like Salesforce, Shopify, Zendesk, Kustomer, Servicenow, and more. Contacto was architected to drive customer loyalty and reduce complexity, while ensuring that agents have a simple and seamless experience with their workflows. With common pain points in the customer experience as its focal point, Contacto was built to level up CCaaS technology using real-world CX gaps as the North Star. These include:

• Customer experience, on their terms: Meet your customers on the channels and devices they demand.
• Unified agent desktop experience: One platform manages all interactions with continual context available so your customers don’t have to repeat themselves—ever.
• Simple configuration and drag-and-drop workflow builder: Build powerful no-code workflows that keep your agents moving forward and your customers happy.

Contacto, Powered by Plivo

The Contacto Contact Center experience is the next chapter in Plivo’s rich history. Contacto is built on Plivo’s Premium Communications Platform, which has been proven for scale over the last 10 years with billions of API requests each month. It natively supports voice and emerging channels like in-app chat, WhatsApp, and social media and has prebuilt integrations with existing applications like Salesforce, Zendesk, Shopify, Kustomer, and more.

We are glad to be here, and we can’t wait to bring the Contact Center space to maturity with the help of our amazing customers and our strong foundation in scaling the Plivo API platform globally in 190+ countries.

Unlock new potential in your contact center by implementing these healthcare customer service secrets.

In the healthcare industry, contact centers are generally more established and mature with efficient routing, tried and true metrics, and continuous quality improvement. Early stage or B2C companies in the retail, ecommerce, regional utility, and non-profit sectors can learn and apply valuable lessons to their (perhaps) less-complex support operations. Granted, the healthcare industry as a whole has a long way to go in leveraging data to eliminate friction and elevate the customer-patient experience, but recent changes to the trajectory of the industry as a whole can inform more nimble contact centers how to offer best-in-class customer interactions.

The notion of the “longitudinal health (or human) record” is one on which even the US government has provided input and guidance to the healthcare industry in efforts to drive improved health outcomes. The basic idea is that all medical providers have access to your single, master copy, digital patient record so as to coordinate, de-duplicate, and improve care delivery. As you consider how to deliver a fast, frictionless experience in your B2C contact center, consider how looking at your customers through the lens of a longitudinal engagement record can inform your contact center priorities:

• Know Me - Customers expect you - to a reasonable degree - to know who they are and their history with your brand. What are the vitals or key data points your agents need to know about your customers? Contacto’s integrations with industry-standard CRMs and OMSs offers your agents a seamless view into previous customer interactions with the Customer Data and Customer History panels.
• Help Me - Customers want to be delighted. Contacto eliminates the “swivel chair” system hopping and operational redundancies by empowering your agents with data, context, and line of sight via a single-pane-of-glass workbench so they can go the extra mile with proactive, human-centric service. Kinda like NOT being handed a clipboard at the doctor’s office. One can dream!
• Keep Me - Customers will come back. If you’ve treated them with dignity and eliminated friction — armed with context, your most valuable asset — transactional and relational scores will be primary symptoms to the underlying dividends yielded in customer loyalty and lifetime value.

You can send an MMS message to any phone number. Businesses can make messages more meaningful by using MMS instead of SMS and including images, audio, and video to provide context. Here’s how to use Plivo’s SMS APIs to send outbound MMS text messages.

How it works

Prerequisites

To get started, you need a Plivo account — sign up with your work email address if you don’t have one already. If this is your first time using Plivo APIs, follow our instructions to set up a Java development environment.

Create the send MMS application

Once you have the above prerequisites set, You can follow the below instructions to create an app to send an outbound MMS to deliver your message.

Create a Java class called SendMMS and paste into it this code.

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package com.plivo.api;
import java.io.IOException;
import com.plivo.api.exceptions.PlivoRestException;
import com.plivo.api.models.media.Media;

public class SendMMS {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
      Plivo.init("<auth_id>", "<auth_token>");
        MessageCreateResponse response = Message.creator("<sender_id>",Collections.singletonList("<destination_number>"),
          "Hello, from Java!").type(MessageType.MMS)
          .media_urls(new String[]{"https://media.giphy.com/media/26gscSULUcfKU7dHq/source.gif"})
          .media_ids(new String[]{"801c2056-33ab-499c-80ef-58b574a462a2"})
          .create();
        System.out.println(response);
      }
   }
}

Replace the auth placeholders with your authentication credentials from the Plivo console. Replace the phone number placeholders with actual phone numbers in E.164 format (for example, +12025551234). In countries other than the US and Canada you can use a sender ID for the message source. You must have a Plivo phone number to send messages to the US or Canada; you can buy a Plivo number from Phone Numbers > Buy Numbers on the Plivo console or via the Numbers API.

Note: We recommend that you store your credentials in the auth_id and auth_token environment variables to avoid the possibility of accidentally committing them to source control. If you do this, you can initialize the client with no arguments and Plivo will automatically fetch the values from the environment variables. You can use System.getenv() to store and retrieve environment variables when initializing the client.

‍

Test

Save the file and run it.

Note: If you’re using a Plivo Trial account, you can make calls only to phone numbers that have been verified with Plivo. You can verify (sandbox) a number by going to the console’s Phone Numbers > Sandbox Numbers page.

Haven’t tried Plivo yet? Getting started is easy and only takes minutes. Sign up today.

Since the inception of the Contact Center more than 60 years ago, the demands placed on it by the business have increased every year. This increase is primarily due to the sheer volume of consumer products and services paired with the rise of communication technology. In response to this relentless pressure, new features were tacked on over time, morphing the Contact Center into a clunky but immeasurably necessary business unit. And more recently, it has been acknowledged as a critical revenue center.

We’re at a pivotal point in the life cycle of the modern Contact Center for two primary reasons:

1. The demands on Contact Centers will only continue to increase as technology advances and consumer communication preferences shift. The rapid pace of growth makes it difficult to know what the business needs are for today and will be for the future.
2. Contact Center vendors may offer similar features on paper, but these features were often created agnostic of the others and lack the required interoperability. And each new technology added seems to create exponential growth in complexity.

The result of the two points above? A reactive customer service motion that is, simply put, stuck between having too many tools (not having a single reliable place to manage every interaction) and having a piecemeal data/reporting strategy that makes optimization decisions difficult.

The road to implementing a healthy Contact Center - getting started

We know that unnecessary complexity is detrimental, but doing nothing in the face of shifting consumer trends is perhaps moreso. So how do we plot a course forward that both keeps up with consumer trends and fits your business? We’ve come up with a list of considerations that will take your CCaaS operations from large, clunky dinosaur status to living, breathing, revenue-driving workflows that blend CC philosophy with technology.

1. Identify the objectives of your Contact Center
   By understanding the SMART goals of a Contact Center, your organization will be able to home in on what truly matters as it relates to processes and technologies. These objectives might include CSAT, customer retention rate, time to resolution, NPS score, repeat customer tickets, similar issues, etc.
2. Map objectives to individual and team KPIs
   Taking objective-building to the next level and ensuring that each person on your team understands how their role will impact the overall objective is essential to putting a sensible tactical framework together. These team KPIs could include average response time, abandonment rate, first contact resolution (FCR), transfer rate, etc.
3. Map your team’s KPIs to the foundational processes in the customer service motion
   With everyone aligned on the objectives and key results, it’s time to identify what needs to happen in order to bring these to life—channel inventory, required operational functionality (chatbots, virtual agents, automations, etc.), data management, agent training, new products and policies, etc. By identifying the processes that will help you achieve success, you’ll be able to line up the tools you need to succeed.
4. Map your processes and required functionality to a complementary set of tools that are simple, interoperable and efficient
   Hint: your contact center platform should serve as the centerpiece of your stack as it relates to day-to-day execution. The stack should be unified by a central platform built to make the agent experience as efficient as possible so the customers can reach you, get help, and move on. Perhaps the most important part of this is the ability to easily build workflows that unify the native features with the integrated features. A good Contact Center platform will keep it all together.

We’ll be writing and sharing more of our thoughts on the modern Contact Center in the coming weeks. Feel free to bookmark our blog for best practices and updates in the customer service space.

You can also take a self-guided demo of our Contact Center platform, or request a custom demo from our team here.

Overview

Click-to-call enables your website users to engage with your support and sales teams on the website itself. Sometimes they want to speak to someone via their handset but initiate the call online or talk to someone directly from the website. You can implement this click-to-call use case using Plivo’s Browser SDK.

How it works

Prerequisites

To get started, you need a Plivo account — sign up with your work email address if you don’t have one already. You must have a voice-enabled Plivo phone number to receive incoming calls; you can rent numbers from the Numbers page of the Plivo console, or by using the Numbers API. Click-to-call requires JavaScript; we recommend using Node.js. If this is your first time triggering a PHLO with Node.js, follow our instructions to set up a Node.js development environment and a web server and safely expose that server to the internet.

Create a PHLO to handle call logic

‍

To create a PHLO, visit the PHLO page of the Plivo console. If this is your first PHLO, the PHLO page will be empty.

• Click Create New PHLO.
• In the Choose your use case pop-up, click Build my own. The PHLO canvas will appear with the Start node.

Note: The Start node is the starting point of any PHLO. It lets you trigger a PHLO to start upon one of three actions: incoming SMS message, incoming call, or API request.

• Click the Start node to open the Configuration tab, and then enter the information to retrieve from the HTTP Request payload — in this case key names are destinationNumber and phoneMeNumber. The values will remain blank as we will receive them when the request is made by the browser.
• Validate the configuration by clicking Validate. Do the same for each node as you go along.
• From the list of components on the left side, drag and drop the Initiate Call component onto the canvas. This adds an Initiate Call node onto the canvas. When a component is placed on the canvas it becomes a node.
• Draw a line to connect the Start node’s API Request trigger state to the Initiate Call node.
• In the Configuration tab of the Initiate Call node, give the node a name. To enter values for the From and To fields, enter two curly brackets to view all available variables, and choose the appropriate ones. The values for the numbers will be retrieved from the HTTP Request payload you defined in the Start node. Here From is 14159142884 and To is {{Start.http.params.phoneMeNumber}}.
• From the list of components on the left side, drag and drop the Call Forward component onto the canvas. Draw a line to connect the Answered trigger state of the Initiate Call node with the Call Forward node.
• Configure the Call Forward node to initiate call forward to another user. To enter values for the From and To fields, enter two curly brackets to view all available variables, and choose the appropriate ones. The values for the numbers will be retrieved from the HTTP Request payload you defined in the Start node. Here From is {{Start.http.params.phoneMeNumber}} and To is {{Start.http.params.destinationNumber}}.
• After you complete and validate the node configurations, give the PHLO a name by clicking in the upper left, then click Save.
• From the list of components on the left side, drag and drop the Call Forward component onto the canvas.
• Draw a line to connect the Start node’s Incoming call trigger state to the Call Forward node.
• In the Configuration tab of the Call Forward node, give the node a name. To enter values for the From and To fields, enter two curly brackets to view all available variables, and choose the appropriate ones. The values for the numbers will be retrieved from the HTTP Request payload you defined in the Start node. Here From is {{Start.http.params.header1}}. and To is {{Start.http.params.to}}.
• After you complete and validate the node configurations, give the PHLO a name by clicking in the upper left, then click Save.

Your complete PHLO should look like this:

Set up the demo application locally

Download and modify the code to trigger the PHLO.

• Clone the repository from GitHub.

$ git clone https://github.com/plivo/click2call-webRTC.git

• Change your working directory to click2call-webRTC.

$ cd click2call-webRTC

• Install the necessary dependencies using the package.json file.

$ npm install

• Edit the .env file. Replace the auth placeholders with your authentication credentials from the Plivo console. Enter your PHLO ID, which you can find on the Plivo console.

PORT="8080"
PLIVO_AUTH_ID="<auth_id>"
PLIVO_AUTH_TOKEN="<auth_token>"
PHLO_ID="<phlo_url>"

• Edit /client/src/index.jsx and replace the caller_id placeholder with a Plivo number.

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const customCallerId = <caller_id>;
const extraHeaders = {
    'X-PH-Test1': 'test1',
    'X-PH-callerId': customCallerId
};
this.plivoBrowserSdk.client.call(dest, extraHeaders);

A review of the code

Let‘s walk through what the code does. The PHLO can be triggered either by an incoming call or an HTTP request.

Broswer SDK call

When someone clicks on an application button to initiate a call, we can use the Browser SDK‘s call() method to initiate a call from the application endpoint to the destination phone number. In this case our PHLO is the endpoint, so our outbound call is treated as an incoming call to our PHLO. When the request we make from the browser reaches the endpoint, the browser is connected to Plivo via the endpoint and the endpoint is attached to the PHLO, so when the browser makes a request to Plivo as an incoming call, Plivo connects to the endpoint, which in turn triggers the PHLO to forward the call to the destination number.

The code looks like this.

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const customCallerId = <caller_id>;
const extraHeaders = {
    'X-PH-Test1': 'test1',
    'X-PH-callerId': customCallerId
};
this.plivoBrowserSdk.client.call(dest, extraHeaders);

Here the extraHeaders is used to pass the caller_id for a call initiated by the broswer.

Click-to-call

Click-to-call is a more complicated use case because it requires us to actually send an HTTP request with a payload to the PHLO endpoint. Remember that we‘re making a call to our user‘s handset first, then connecting to the destination once the first call is answered. We need to get both phone numbers from the application and send them to the server. The code looks like this.

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let XMLReq = new XMLHttpRequest();
XMLReq.open("POST", "/makeCall");
XMLReq.setRequestHeader("Content-Type", "application/json");
XMLReq.onreadystatechange = function() {
    console.log('response text', XMLReq.responseText);
}
XMLReq.send(JSON.stringify({
    "src": this.state.phoneMeNumber,
    "dst": dest
}));

We need to listen for this request on the server. Once we receive the request and get the numbers from the payload, we set up another HTTP request that sends this data to the PHLO.

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// when we receive an http post request
app.post('/makeCall/', function(req, res) {
    console.log(req.fields);

    jsonObject = JSON.stringify({
        "phoneMeNumber": req.fields.src,
        "destinationNumber": req.fields.dst,
    });
    
    // prepare the header
    let postHeaders = {
        'Content-Type': 'application/json',
        'Authorization': 'Basic ' + new Buffer.from(process.env.<auth_id> +':' + process.env.<auth_token>).toString('base64')
    };
    
    // set the post options
    let postOptions = {
        port: 443,
        host: 'phlo-runner-service.plivo.com',
        path: process.env.<phlo_id>,
        method: 'POST',
        headers: postHeaders,
    };
    
    // do the POST request
    let reqPost = https.request(postOptions, function(response) {
        console.log("statusCode: ", response.statusCode);
        response.on('data', function(d) {
            console.info('POST result:\n');
            process.stdout.write(d);
            console.info('\n\nPOST completed');
            res.send(d);
        });
    });
    
    // write the json data
    console.log(jsonObject);
    reqPost.write(jsonObject);
    reqPost.end();
    reqPost.on('error', function(e) { // log any errors
        console.error(e);
    });
})

Assign the PHLO to a Plivo number

Once you’ve created and configured your PHLO, assign it to a Plivo number.

• On the Numbers page of the console, under Your Numbers, click the phone number you want to use for the PHLO.
• In the Number Configuration box, select PHLO from the Application Type drop-down.
• From the PHLO Name drop-down, select the PHLO you want to use with the phone number, then click Update Number.

Test

Run these commands.

npm run watch
npm run start

You should see your basic server application running at http://localhost:8080/. Set up ngrok to expose your local server to the internet. Now make a call from your browser-based application to test it.

Note: If you’re using a Plivo Trial account, you can make calls only to phone numbers that have been verified with Plivo. You can verify (sandbox) a number by going to the console’s Phone Numbers Sandbox Numbers page.

Haven’t tried Plivo yet? Getting started is easy and only takes minutes. Sign up today.

Plivo lets you automate voice surveys for use cases such as collecting feedback from customers and conducting polling on political issues. You can set up multiple levels of questions and walk users through different paths depending on the keys they press in response to your questions, and save the responses for analysis.

How it works

Prerequisites

To get started, you need a Plivo account — sign up with your work email address if you don’t have one already. If this is your first time triggering a PHLO with Node.js, follow our instructions to set up a Node.js development environment.

Create the PHLO

To create a PHLO, visit the PHLO page of the Plivo console. If this is your first PHLO, the PHLO page will be empty.

• Click Create New PHLO.
• In the Choose your use case pop-up, click Build my own. The PHLO canvas will appear with the Start node.

Note: The Start node is the starting point of any PHLO. It lets you trigger a PHLO to start upon one of three actions: incoming SMS message, incoming call, or API request.

• Click the Start node to open the Configuration tab to the right of the canvas, then enter the information to retrieve from the HTTP Request payload. For this example, enter From and To phone numbers and your business name.

• Validate the configuration by clicking Validate. Every time you finish configuring a node, click Validate to check the syntax and save your changes.

• From the list of components on the left side, drag and drop the Initiate Call component onto the canvas. This adds an Initiate Call node onto the canvas. When a component is placed on the canvas it becomes a node.
• Draw a line to connect the Start node’s API Request trigger state to the Initiate Call node.

• In the Configuration tab of the Initiate Call node, rename the node to Call_Customer. You can rename nodes as you like to improve your PHLO’s readability. To enter values for the From and To fields, start typing two curly brackets. PHLO will display a list of all available variables; choose the appropriate ones. When you use variables in a PHLO, the values are retrieved from the HTTP Request payload you defined in the Start node.

• Next, drag and drop the IVR Menu component onto the canvas. Draw a line to connect the Initiate Call node‘s Answered trigger state to the IVR Menu node.

• Click the IVR Menu node to open its Configuration tab. Rename the IVR Menu node Question_1. For this example, select 1 and 2 as allowed choices. In the Speak Text box, enter a message to play to the user that introduces the survey and states the choices they can respond with. If you like, you can also configure the Language and Voice fields for the message.

• Repeat the process with another IVR Menu node. Rename it Question_2.

‍

• To daisy-chain to the second question after the user gives a valid response to question 1, connect the Question_1 node‘s 1 and 2 trigger states to the Question_2 node.

• Configure the choices for Question_2 on its Configuration tab. Again, select 1 and 2 as allowed choices and enter a message to play to the user.

• Drag and drop the Play Audio component onto the canvas. Draw a line to connect the Question_2 node‘s 1 and 2 trigger states to the Play Audio node.

• In its Configuration tab, rename the node to Acknowledge_Participation. Enter a message of thanks to play to the user in the node‘s Speak Text box.

• Drag and drop the HTTP Request component onto the canvas. Draw a line to connect the Acknowledge_Participation node‘s Prompt Completed trigger state to the HTTP Request node.

• Rename the HTTP Request node Handle_Callback. Configure the node to post the survey results to a website. On its Configuration tab, enter key names answer1 and answer2. For their values, begin typing two curly brackets to view all available variables, then select Question_1.digits and Question_2.digits.

• Give the PHLO a name by clicking in the upper left, then click Save.

Your PHLO is now ready to test.

Trigger the PHLO

You integrate a PHLO into your application workflow by making an API request to trigger the PHLO with the required payload — the set of parameters you pass to the PHLO. You can define a static payload by specifying values when you create the PHLO, or define a dynamic payload by passing values through parameters when you trigger the PHLO from your application.

With a static payload

When you configure values when creating the PHLO, they act as a static payload.

Code

Create a file and paste the below code.

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import plivo

phlo_id = "<phlo_id>"
phlo_client = plivo.phlo.RestClient("<auth_id>", "<auth_token>")
phlo = phlo_client.phlo.get(phlo_id)
response = phlo.run()
print(response)

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require 'rubygems'
require 'plivo'

include Plivo

AUTH_ID = '<auth_id>'
AUTH_TOKEN = '<auth_token>'

client = Phlo.new(AUTH_ID, AUTH_TOKEN)

# if credentials are stored in the PLIVO_AUTH_ID and the PLIVO_AUTH_TOKEN environment variables
# then initialize client as:
# client = Phlo.new

begin
  phlo = client.phlo.get('<phlo_id>')
  response = phlo.run()
  puts response
rescue PlivoRESTError => e
  puts 'Exception: ' + e.message
end

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var plivo = require('plivo');
var PhloClient = plivo.PhloClient;

var phloId = '<phlo_id>';
var phloClient = phlo = null;

phloClient = new PhloClient('<auth_id>', '<auth_token>');
phloClient.phlo(phloId).run().then(function(result) {
    console.log('Phlo run result', result);
}).catch(function(err) {
    console.error('Phlo run failed', err);
});

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<?php
require 'vendor/autoload.php';
use Plivo\Resources\PHLO\PhloRestClient;
use Plivo\Exceptions\PlivoRestException;
$client = new PhloRestClient("<auth_id>", "<auth_token>");

$phlo = $client->phlo->get("<phlo_id>");
try {
    $response = $phlo->run();
    print_r($response);
} catch (PlivoRestException $ex) {
    print_r($ex);
}

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package main

import (
	"fmt"
	"plivo-go"
)

// Initialize the following params with corresponding values to trigger resources
const authId = "<auth_id>"
const authToken = "<auth_token>"
const phloId = "<phlo_id>"

func main() {
	testPhloRunWithoutParams()
}

func testPhloRunWithoutParams() {
	phloClient, err := plivo.NewPhloClient(authId, authToken, &plivo.ClientOptions{})
	if err != nil {
		fmt.Print("Error", err.Error())
		return
	}
	phloGet, err := phloClient.Phlos.Get(phloId)
	if err != nil {
		fmt.Print("Error", err.Error())
		return
	}
	response, err := phloGet.Run(nil)
	if err != nil {
		fmt.Print("Error", err.Error())
		return
	}
	fmt.Printf("Response: %#v\n", response)
}

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using System;
using Plivo;

namespace test_PHLO
{
    class Program
    {
        public static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            var phloClient = new PhloApi("<auth_id>", "<auth_token>"); 
            var phloID = "<phlo_id>";
            var phlo = phloClient.Phlo.Get(phloID);   
            Console.WriteLine(phlo.Run());
        }
    }
}

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curl --request POST \
  --user AUTH_ID:AUTH_TOKEN \
  --url 'https://phlorunner.plivo.com/v1/account/{auth_id}/phlo/{phlo_id}' \
  --header 'Content-Type: application/json'

Replace the auth placeholders with your authentication credentials from the Plivo console. Replace the phlo_id placeholder with your PHLO ID from the Plivo console.

With a dynamic payload

To use dynamic values for the parameters, use Liquid templating parameters when you create the PHLO and pass the values from your code to the PHLO when you trigger it.

Code

Create a file and paste the below code.

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import plivo

phlo_id = "<phlo_id>"
phlo_client = plivo.phlo.RestClient("<auth_id>", "<auth_token>")
phlo = phlo_client.phlo.get(phlo_id)
response = phlo.run()
print(response)

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require 'rubygems'
require 'plivo'

include Plivo

AUTH_ID = '<auth_id>'
AUTH_TOKEN = '<auth_token>'

client = Phlo.new(AUTH_ID, AUTH_TOKEN)

# if credentials are stored in the PLIVO_AUTH_ID and the PLIVO_AUTH_TOKEN environment variables
# then initialize client as:
# client = Phlo.new

begin
  phlo = client.phlo.get('<phlo_id>')
  response = phlo.run()
  puts response
rescue PlivoRESTError => e
  puts 'Exception: ' + e.message
end

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var plivo = require('plivo');
var PhloClient = plivo.PhloClient;

var phloId = '<phlo_id>';
var phloClient = phlo = null;

phloClient = new PhloClient('<auth_id>', '<auth_token>');
phloClient.phlo(phloId).run().then(function(result) {
    console.log('Phlo run result', result);
}).catch(function(err) {
    console.error('Phlo run failed', err);
});

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<?php
require 'vendor/autoload.php';
use Plivo\Resources\PHLO\PhloRestClient;
use Plivo\Exceptions\PlivoRestException;
$client = new PhloRestClient("<auth_id>", "<auth_token>");

$phlo = $client->phlo->get("<phlo_id>");
try {
    $response = $phlo->run();
    print_r($response);
} catch (PlivoRestException $ex) {
    print_r($ex);
}

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import com.plivo.api.Plivo;
import com.plivo.api.PlivoClient;
import com.plivo.api.exceptions.PlivoRestException;
import com.plivo.api.models.phlo.Phlo;
import java.io.IOException;

public class Example
{
    private static final String authId = "<auth_id>";
    private static final String authToken = "<auth_token>";
    private static PlivoClient client = new PlivoClient(authId, authToken);
    public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException, PlivoRestException
    {
        String phloId = "<phlo_id>";
        Plivo.init(authId, authToken);
        Phlo phlo = Phlo.getter(phloId).client(client).get();
        PhloUpdateResponse response = Phlo.updater(phloId).payload().run();
    }
}

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package main

import (
	"fmt"
	"plivo-go"
)

// Initialize the following params with corresponding values to trigger resources
const authId = "<auth_id>"
const authToken = "<auth_token>"
const phloId = "<phlo_id>"

func main() {
	testPhloRunWithoutParams()
}

func testPhloRunWithoutParams() {
	phloClient, err := plivo.NewPhloClient(authId, authToken, &plivo.ClientOptions{})
	if err != nil {
		fmt.Print("Error", err.Error())
		return
	}
	phloGet, err := phloClient.Phlos.Get(phloId)
	if err != nil {
		fmt.Print("Error", err.Error())
		return
	}
	response, err := phloGet.Run(nil)
	if err != nil {
		fmt.Print("Error", err.Error())
		return
	}
	fmt.Printf("Response: %#v\n", response)
}

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using System;
using Plivo;

namespace test_PHLO
{
    class Program
    {
        public static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            var phloClient = new PhloApi("<auth_id>", "<auth_token>"); 
            var phloID = "<phlo_id>";
            var phlo = phloClient.Phlo.Get(phloID);   
            Console.WriteLine(phlo.Run());
        }
    }
}

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curl --request POST \
  --user AUTH_ID:AUTH_TOKEN \
  --url 'https://phlorunner.plivo.com/v1/account/{auth_id}/phlo/{phlo_id}' \
  --header 'Content-Type: application/json'

Replace the auth placeholders with your authentication credentials from the Plivo console. Replace the phlo_id placeholder with your PHLO ID from the Plivo console. Replace the phone number placeholders with actual phone numbers in E.164 format (for example, +12025551234).

Test

Save the file and run it.

Note: If you’re using a Plivo Trial account, you can make calls only to phone numbers that have been verified with Plivo. You can verify (sandbox) a number by going to the console’s Phone Numbers > Sandbox Numbers page.

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